When a country is poor, the first idea of what it produces is to make gains from exports, with good revenues from the generally more affluent nations. It also helps create a good balance in hard currency to import what is needed.
India has the great fortune of exporting abundant IT-Information Technology products, worth about $194 billion in 2022, employing a high number of specialists, close to 5.4 million. In addition, as a further step, it has in its territory more than 1500 GCC- Global Captive Centres, from multinational companies, focused on making a quick adaptation to digitalization to be able to use AI-artificial Intelligence, ML-Machine Learning, IoT- Internet of things, Robotization, etc. The GCC currently employs around 1.8 million specialists in India. And their production value exceeds $35 bn. Soon, more than 500 new GCCs will come to India.
When a country feels comfortable with its financial situation, the citizens see the possibility of acquiring items prohibited until then due to the lack of income. Increased consumption buoys the market, creating the appearance that its growth is much more substantial. Indeed, there cannot be restrictions on food and health items, essentials, and some technology; for moderate tourism, first inside the country, then in other places of our imagination, and maybe some comfort search in physical facilities.
Some wealthier people can also set the pace and cost level of new acquisitions, referring to a lifestyle they intend to differentiate from that of the vast majority. It is when someone does bold and luxurious options, if savings allow, buying a good car, moving to a more luxurious apartment in a more “exclusive” area, etc., to enjoy a certain “status” in society.
When the production of consumable goods increases and the population, in general, becomes more affluent, one must consider whether it would not be better to prioritize domestic consumption, avoiding the obsession with exporting. It is, in fact, worth asking why to ship when there is unsatisfied internal demand; if people inside the country already have enough, exporting seems logical.
There used to be a prejudice to admit that the best quality was for export and the least good for domestic consumption. It seems logical that the quality of domestic consumption products must be the same as for exports. Every consumer deserves respect and should be able to purchase the best quality products if he wants to.
One way to extend the shelf life of perishable products, such as seafood and vegetables, is to preserve them to reach distant points of national and international geography.
Good research on preserving the wide variety of seafood products, associated with attracting capital to invest, is an excellent way to add much value and make the products able to reach all citizens, even in the far interior regions of the country.
India has a large production and export of fish and a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, oils, cereals, etc. Their transformation can add much more value; finding out what to do matters in each case.
In what matters to fruits, fortunately, we have a wide variety of juices, concentrates and other forms of presentation of traditional food products, now well preserved, with very hygienic processes, as is the case with the varieties of lassi, that sometimes before was prepared on the spot. Nowadays, varieties of lassi, equipped with different flavours, are bottled, well-packaged and refrigerated.
India is a vast continent with a great variety of vegetables, associated with many microclimates and diverse temperatures from the North to the South of the country. It is good to find out if good fruits, e.g. apples from Jammu & Kashmir and other fruits from Manipur and North East States, reach all other States of India. It is crucial to promote abundant production in each place, to take it to the whole country and consume in good conditions for an extended time.
In general, locally unavailable products are the most appreciated and potential consumers wait their turn. Therefore, in the same way, as the Portuguese did at the time of the discoveries, it is vital to develop a systematic attitude of trying to see if certain plantations that came from other distant countries or other states of India can grow in different climatic conditions where they do not exist yet, starting in areas with a climate similar to where they came from.
In all agricultural production and other economic activities, choose the varieties using some science to achieve good yields, selecting and buying saplings of well-known plants, which are more appreciated and valuable. One can purchase them at good agronomic stations, still when sold at a higher price. Such quality saplings and their cost are compensated by the ‘guaranteed’ value of production and sale of their fruits over the life of the plant/tree. In addition to good productivity, other characteristics, such as flavour, sweetness, juice, and colours, are essential.
It is not just about optimizing what is grown, looking for new varieties that are more productive and resistant to climatic excesses. Still, one can and should go further. Sometimes, it is necessary to radically change the type of cultivation to reach yields per hectare of land much higher than the initial production one was trying to optimize. This mindset of change already occurs in some areas of India. The productivity per acre is multiplied several times by that of traditional products.
Fortunately, there are situations like this in India that, by imitation, seeing what the neighbours do, could go much faster. If they do not, it is because of financial constraints allied to replacing the traditional crop (the new crop will only begin to yield income in some time); continuing to sow the usual gives uninterrupted returns, although much lower.
Getting a good yield out of the land is an important science. That is because several solutions to get more, non-depleting the soil, as frequently by creating associations of land owners of small farms to move from a culture of minor importance to the culture of an acceptable extension of several farmers in alliance that allows to obtain good economies of scale and, later, to negotiate better sales prices, based on the quantity of the product.
One Indian Trust, the Global Vikas Trust- GVT, works in Maharastra, Gujarat and Madya Pradesh, helping marginal farmers with small lands earn much more per acre, substituting the usual crops with fruit trees. In Sep. 2023, GVT could affirm that it worked in 3300 villages and 27 districts in 3 States. It has impacted 91,000 Individuals and 20,000 farmers’ families and acted on 32,000 acres of land. The earnings of each farmer came multiplied by 4 to 10 times per acre.
(The author is Professor at AESE-Business School (Lisbon), at IIM Rohtak (India), author of The Rise of India)
